


Le Gars

by lyhoradka



Series: The Shovel [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, again I maintain that this should be Augustine vs. Mercymorn but the ao3 tags are not built that way, lots of metaphors about eating things in basically every way this can be interpreted, no beta we die like cavaliers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 02:55:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29976315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyhoradka/pseuds/lyhoradka
Summary: Cytherea played her next card. It settled on the table with the image pointing away from Augustine, the word upside down, but he didn’t need to read it. It was the brightest, loveliest card in the deck — a sun wreathed in gold. An unsettling, thousand-wheeled nothing. Something made of cartilage and beautiful pink flesh; something that might have been called an angel once upon a time.Judgment.Cytherea sank further away from the light. “Your move.”~~Augustine and Cytherea play cards. God makes an announcement. Three people orbit dios apate. Someone wants to go home.
Relationships: Augustine the First & Cytherea the First, Augustine the First/John Gaius | Necrolord Prime/Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First/Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
Series: The Shovel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2204883
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	Le Gars

**Author's Note:**

> this could be a standalone, but is compliant with The Shovel.  
> special thank you to everyone who had to deal with me pretending that i wasn't going to write this fic while i was writing this fic, especially the eternal hero lizardkisser.  
> i cannot apologize enough for using a french title for this fic.

_I say that what he might mean by love is desire._  
_Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?_

_We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice_  
_repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say_  
_to him._

_Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at_  
_someone you want to eat and not eat them._

_Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby._

_Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to_  
_live in purgatory._

-Marie Howe, “After the Movie”

* * *

Augustine the First had a dream, sometimes. It started like this: he is running down the hall of his childhood home, playing hide and seek. His brother’s voice echoes around him, perfectly audible in every part of the house: _eleven, ten, nine_ _…_ Augustine is running out of time to hide. He pulls the handle of a heavy door - miraculously, it opens for him without a whisper of complaint - and his heart hammers loudly in his ears as he sprints down to the labs. _Five, four_ _…_

Alfred is at the end of the hall, hands over his eyes even though he faces the wall. From behind, he looks no older than seven or eight. His curls gleam golden even in the fluorescent light of the lamp. The door of Cytherea’s laboratory is covered in sticky notes and diagrams, and a small piece of paper detached from the fiberglass and flutters to the floor as Alfred calls out, _three, two_ _…_

Sometimes, when Augustine woke up, he was already crying. It was such a banal thing to cry over. What irked him the most is that he wasn't certain, really, what brought him to tears. Was it frustration over the memories that were lost to death and time? He didn't remember where he grew up. He didn't know if he had a childhood home.

Was it sick longing for the house that was his home in every way that mattered?

Augustine thought that maybe it is not Alfred who was haunting him like this. Alfred’s soul was safely devoured by his brother’s - there was not much left of him to haunt. Maybe the revenant in Augustine’s dreams was just Canaan House, bitter at being abandoned. Asking him to return home. Promising him, sweetly, an easy death.

~~

But first - Cytherea Loveday.

Cytherea was always the best of them, no matter what. She alone loved them all, warts and all. Not even John could say the same.

When Augustine told her as much, she had laughed. They had left only one lamp on, and pooled between them on the table like a bowl of dark gold light. Her teeth looked very white in the shadows. “I don’t think that’s a fair comparison,” she said, and put a card face-up.

Knight of Pentacles, blood swirling around the robe that hid his face.

Augustine raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

It was such a pleasure to watch Cytherea think. She always took him so seriously. It should have been an odd thing to want for a man whose word was as close to God’s as it could be. He held no desire to impress her. Perhaps it was something extraordinary to feel her kindness turn on him, like a sun that should have dimmer ten thousand years ago.

“They’re different kinds of affection,” she said at last, slowly. She waved a hand at the cards, inviting Augustine to move the game along, and he considered the cards in hand as she continued. “We don’t love you in the same way. It doesn’t make sense to compare them. Oh,” she beamed in pleasure. “What an excellent move.”

“In what way?”

“In what way is it a good move?” Cytherea’s smile grew. “Or in what way do our deep wells of passion for you differ?”

Augustine kicked out a foot under the table, but she was too fast for him. With a sharp, ringing laugh, she drew her legs up to her chest and peered at him over her knees. The movement pushed her deeper into the darkness.

“Oh, desist, you big baby,” she demanded. “Obviously you’re a terrible person, and I wish you and Mercymorn wouldn’t needle each other quite so much. And sometimes your belt doesn’t match your shoes —”

“Uncalled for!”

“—But entirely fair, wouldn’t you say?” Cytherea sniffed, her attention now entirely on the cards. “I do like you quite a bit, though, in spite of all those flaws. Probably because you like me in spite of mine. But John…” She paused. “Well, I think John loves you the way most people love breathing. You just keep doing it, because what’s the alternative?”

She glanced at his face, and whatever she saw there made her laugh again, a smidgen unkindly. “I’m making it sound more romantic than it is,” she told him. “Our Emperor is not very sentimental, you know. He would eat you if he had to, that’s all I mean. Even now. Like in that poem he likes, about the fruit and the knife.” And then, in a different voice, she added, “I wouldn’t. I have been taught a lesson, you see.”

With that remark, Cytherea played her next card. It settled on the table with the image pointing away from Augustine, the word upside down, but he didn’t need to read it. It was the brightest, loveliest card in the deck — a sun wreathed in gold. An unsettling, thousand-wheeled nothing. Something made of cartilage and beautiful pink flesh; something that might have been called an angel once upon a time.

Judgment.

Cytherea sank further away from the light. “Your move.”

~~

You always dreamed the stairs right. The image fell apart from there — hallways drawn out too long, marble echoing underfoot. The ceilings grew too high, the doors turned to metal, and the lights flickered overhead because it took us months to fix the wiring in the labs. But before Canaan House broke through and choked the memory, you managed to remember the stairs of the house where we grew up.

You’ve lost the rest now, so here it is, the complete picture. (You would have hated if this story were left unfinished, no matter which way the brush stroke lay over the painting of your face.)

Those stairs led onto a narrow landing covered in worn taupe carpet. We shared a bedroom, the walls painted a vibrant green like the underbelly of a frog. You never blamed me for choosing that color. You must have seen how much I loved it, how I delighted in it. You have always protected the things I loved.

The rest of the house isn’t important, just a collection of rooms and colorful rugs. The kitchen sink forever heaped with dishes. The coat rack forever heaped with scarves. The comforting hum of the air conditioner. Bookshelves so tall that not even you could reach the very top, no matter how far you stretched your fingers. The cross hanging over the doorway like a guardian or an omen or a sign. The radio, stuck on one channel for so long that we knew all the songs by heart, mouthing along to the words and grinning at one another over the dinner table: _Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love. Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love._

You don’t remember asking, _is it true? Is that what love feels like?_

You don’t remember the answer.

~~

Cards with Cytherea again, the Emperor interrupting. He stood in the doorway and watched them play until Augustine looked up and caught his gaze.

It was cold in the room. You should have turned off the air conditioning.

John cleared his throat. Without preamble, he began, “I would have liked to tell all of you this at once, but that won’t be possible for some time. I will tell Mercy over comm, and Gideon is…indisposed.” He paused, though he knew what he would say. He must have known. “As soon as the preparations are completed, I will invite the Necromancers and Cavaliers of my Houses to learn how to become my Lyctors, should they prove capable and willing.”

No hesitation, no regret. The silence reigned around them.

It’s funny, in retrospect, how a moment that hangs heavy and important, will turn out to be pivotal for an entirely unpredictable reason. Augustine stared at the Emperor, gaping like an idiot. He knew that everything he felt was written on his face because the Emperor was looking back at him, head cocked to the side, the turn of his mouth impassive. He was still wearing his laurel of bones, but a burst of air on the bridge must have been too strong because his hair was ruffled, falling over his forehead in a show of humanity that would have been unseemly a myriad ago. He merely waited as Augustine blinked at him like an actor in a play who had forgotten his lines.

And while they looked at one another, neither of them was looking at Cytherea.

Darling Cytherea. Charming Cytherea. How would things be different, if only you had seen the horror in her eyes. Would God have witnessed the beginning of his own end in the resolute set of her jaw?

Sweet brother, you didn’t even hear the crinkle of the cards as she crumpled them in her fist.

Nine of swords. The Hanged Man.

Your move.

“You cannot possibly make them do this,” Augustine said. His voice sounded odd to his own ears.

“I will not make anyone do anything. I will allow a period of study and investigation - they will do nothing until they are ready.”

Augustine searched John’s face for a hint of doubt, and hysteria choked him when he found none. He tamped down the urge to laugh like a demented hyena; it seemed so very much like something Mercymorn would do.

“You will invite them to First House?” Cytherea spoke at last. Her hands were folded in her lap, her expression carefully neutral. At John’s nod, her lips thinned, but she said nothing else.

She rose to her feet, adjusting the folds of her skirt until it lay to her specifications. Augustine hadn’t realized she was leaving until he was lifting his head automatically to allow her to press a single dry kiss to his cheek. Her perfume filled his nose for a moment — something candied and unexpectedly fresh. Like a bowl of dessert at an outdoor picnic.

As she kissed John goodbye, she lingered to say something quietly in his ear. John frowned briefly, as though in thought, but Augustine didn’t see her lips move and couldn’t even begin to guess at what she’d said. With that farewell, she departed.

In the small respite given by Cytherea’s goodbye, Augustine began to think. When John had first brought up the idea ten years ago, it had seemed a rhetorical suggestion. Now it was staring him in the face, a decision made. It would take only a few years for the preparations to complete, perhaps a decade if Augustine convinced Mercymorn to use their considerable efforts to delay.

They could not stop this. The carcass of their solution rotted on Ninth.

Augustine looked up. “What can I say to change your mind?”

John’s eyebrows rose. He said nothing for a moment, just watching Augustine with those wretched eyes. “You think this is a bad idea, my Hand?”

“I think I am no saint — I have done nothing to earn that title other than serve you, and even that has not been virtuous — but I don’t want to put a knife in the hands of those—” He grimaced, finding his hands gripping his hair tightly, and let go. “Those _children_ ,” he spit out.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child—” John began, voice like a bell.

Suddenly, Augustine was on his feet. “Do not,” he gritted out, “quote scripture at _me_.” He found that he wanted to say that he never imagined that God were capable of this. But of course He was. He was capable of anything.

“We were your disciples before we were your Hands. We became Lyctors because we loved you, and we loved you because we knew you. The babes from the Houses will know nothing.” Augustine spread his hands as though at a loss, and did not look away from God’s face. “My Lord, how will they be anything but a disappointment to you?”

John returned his gaze steadily. “They will serve well enough.”

 _For what_ , Augustine wanted to ask. _More fodder for your vengeance on people long dead?_

He looked away, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry that I will miss Joy’s reaction to this, then.”

John frowned, this time with obvious concern, and said, “You have not been on speaking terms for some time.”

“When are we ever.”

“Augustine, I hate to get in the middle of yet another spat but - is this because of our, ah, activities the last time that we three were together?” John asked bluntly.

Augustine winced. “No.” But he’d said it too quickly, and even he could her the falsehood. He clenched his jaw, then added, “It’s not anything that you think.”

John considered him. Very delicately, he said, “I would hate to create –” he visibly searched for the appropriate word – “embarrassment.”

“No embarrassment,” Augustine said. It wasn’t a lie. They were so far beyond embarrassment. Then, reckless: “Mercymorn is displeased with me. I made a promise and then almost lost my nerve.”

The tar in John’s eyes swirled, a small hurricane. “Did you, in the end? Lose your nerve?”

“No,” Augustine said. “I didn’t.”

~~

Almost.

Augustine had turned to Mercy, his forehead warm and sweaty against John’s hip. He barely felt the pressure of her fingers on his bicep. He met her gaze. And he thought, clearly, _I don_ _’t have to do this_.

Mercy’s eyes widened a fraction. They had known each other too long for her to misinterpret the quirk of his mouth. As though in slow motion, she lifted a hand to his mouth and swiped her thumb, once, over the seal of his lips. She looked at him with perfect understanding, color high in her cheeks and the corners of her mouth turned up like this was funny and she was pretending that it wasn’t.

She leaned closer and kissed his cheek, her breath shuddering against his skin, and suddenly they were at the church. They had stood at the threshold, and now they were kneeling at the altar. As though through a great distance, Augustine saw John weave his fingers through Mercy’s hair.

Mercymorn said, “Make me good, O Lord, but not yet.”

And Augustine turned his face to hers and opened his mouth.

~~

The children of the Nine Houses used to pray to the Emperor’s Saints.

This practice had gone out of fashion, in a manner of speaking, a few hundred years ago. Those who served in the Cohort for any length of time, and achieved the holy honor of stumbling over one of the Saints as they swept out of the Emperor’s meeting rooms or departed to prime the soil for a Cohort invasion; those who had met the Holy Fingers, Holy Hands in all their holy flesh, split more or less into two categories: the disillusioned and the fanatical.

Those who were left behind on the Nine Houses usually fit somewhere in between.

Augustine used to wonder what they said in their prayers.

Now, he mostly missed praying himself.

He could always pray to God, though it seemed in poor taste to ask the Lord for His own demise. He wasn’t particularly concerned with God’s inability or unwillingness to listen; he had never truly expected holy attention even as a child, kneeling at the foot of his bed and muttering his Pater Noster. Praying has long stopped being a form of supplication. It has become a way not of asking for what he wanted, but of figuring out what it was in the first place.

And right now, Augustine knew exactly what he wanted — Commander Wake to finish what she agreed to do instead of crashing like a pitiful fallen star to the crust of Ninth House and destroying five hundred years of work. Or, failing that, Augustine’s hands around Mercy’s throat.

“Is there any way,” Augustine asked, hoping that if he faked calm well enough, he would begin to feel it. “Any way at all that the Tomb had been opened?”

Mercy’s silence crackled through the comm line. The connection was encrypted to seven hells but still shaky, and it seemed the final insult to Augustine that they couldn’t even be there to yell at one another in vibrant technicolor.

“I don’t know,” Mercy said. Even through the static, he could hear the reluctance in her voice. “There’s a chance, but it’s slim.” She fell silent so suddenly that Augustine thought the connection had been lost, and was just beginning to convince himself to bite back his scream of frustration when she spoke again. “Gideon was on her trail.”

“What?”

“I don’t think he knows about the dolls.” Mercy didn’t sound particularly relieved. “You know he’s been on her trail for ages. It could be unrelated.”

“Or it could be the end of everything.”

Mercy snorted scornfully. The speaker crackled like dry twigs snapping. “It’s already the end of everything! The Tomb is locked — or if it’s not, then we’ll find out soon enough — and with Wake dead, it’s only a matter of time before the Cohort stamps the rest of Eden into the dust. They’re not that incompetent.” Augustine could hear her getting hysterical, and it was not improving his mood. “We lied to John for nothing.”

That was intolerable. Augustine didn’t know if Mercy had aimed that jab on purpose, but at least she wasn’t here to see it hit. He could not abide wasted effort. He could not abide wasted sacrifice.

When Mercymorn had asked, lifetimes ago, _where does God_ _’s power come from_ , the answer had been unthinkable. Augustine had sat there, staring into her wild eyes, and came to the conclusion that he would not undermine his brother’s sacrifice. Alfred’s death would not be for nothing. He had died for God, and Augustine would not spit on his death by turning away from it. In all things, symmetry. Cain had wandered the earth, undying and prolific, but even he had not flinched away from God’s light twice.

To have finally twisted the knife and failed made them worse than traitors — it made them fools.

The steel walls of the spaceship seemed to shimmer at the edges of his vision, drawing closer. The doors were locked, the halls populated only by a skeleton crew. No one, not even Mercymorn, knew where he was now or what he had done.

Oh, she knew of the act. She had participated and guided his hand and turned herself into an instrument of betrayal afterward. But she could not know what Augustine had done — that he had lied not only to God and Teacher and proverbial salvation, as Mercy had done, but to his friend.

For nothing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Augustine found himself saying, like a child.

Mercy was too occupied to even acknowledge that inane response. “It’s obvious that the Ninth will have found the wreck, and then — sweet Lord, I don’t even know what’s on that ship.” Even fractured as it was, Augustine heard the panic in her voice. “There could be any number of things that demand an explanation.”

Augustine cut her off. “John won’t find out.”

“How could you possibly—”

“He won’t, Joy. We clean this shit off the floor, we fucking lick it off if we have to, and then we shut up and behave for the next few centuries at least.”

He could almost see her expression. “Very vivid,” she snapped. “We may not have centuries, Augustine. You heard him. He wants new Lyctors.”

“I doubt he was serious.”

“Even if he isn’t now, he’s thinking about it. He is no fool, and he will discover this sooner or later. And then there will be no clemency.”

The finality in her voice made him shiver, but Augustine was too sick with anger to heed the warning. Mercymorn the First was lacking for mercy, and she had learned it from their Lord.

Instead, he gripped the table like he couldn’t hold his own weight anymore, and recited, “You are the fruit, I am the knife. You are the dish, I am the eater.”

Even as Augustine spoke the words, he felt John’s presence at his shoulder, whispering along with the poem. The last line stuck in his throat. _Your eater will do you honor._

What honor was there among thieves?

Mercy’s voice came through the speaker like a howl. “I hope you rot in hell.”

“Fuck your clemency,” he told her.

The line went dead.

~~

You never did go home.

Sometimes, you had come close to – approximations. Planets with similar biomes, usually held by Blood of Eden. Usually in the five hundred years that you and Mercymorn were on the same side, constantly on edge because it was the first time that side was different from John’s. Passing notes in churches like children.

Making promises.

After one of these meetings, as you walked away, it began to rain. The water poured from the sky as though a bucket sharply overturned — one of those unexpected storms that would pass within minutes. Almost unwillingly, you stopped.

It had been so long since you felt rain. Even on planets that sustained some life, even on planets that had something like precipitation, it was a rare thing to find nothing but water falling from the sky. You tilted your face up, ignoring the scuffle as the few pedestrians scrambled to get out of the street.

The water was piercingly cold, nothing like the summer storms of First House. It tasted differently, too, and the smell of the wet earth stung with a metallic aftertaste that you didn’t remember from home. But if you closed your eyes, you could pretend. Only for a moment. Only here, where no one knew you, where an older man scoffed as he hurried past. You heard him muttering about catching a chill with disapproval, loud enough for you to hear.

You smiled wider.

As the streets emptied rapidly, you felt yourself a ghost standing there. What would you haunt, you wondered. A ghost who cannot catch a chill, nor freeze, nor die. A ghost who can withstand anything because he cannot change. An immortal, trapped soul, gorged on his brother. It appeared that when one stops dying, one stops living, too.

Eventually, the rain passed. As it petered out slowly, you wondered if Mercymorn had been caught in it as well. Cristabel had loved the rain, loved the water in general. She had dragged us all out to go swimming more than times than you could count, even A.L. on good days. Cristabel, who loved water so much that she said once that she would like to die by drowning, if she got to choose.

Well, we can’t always get what we want.

~~

Augustine heard himself say, as through from a great distance, “It’s just a damn house.”

Mercy stared at him. Then, quietly, she began to laugh. It was mocking and cruel and unkind, her teeth sharp and glinting in the dim light of the window. She shook her head at him with pity, as if he were a slow child. “Just a house,” she echoed. She had said it quietly, but the words seemed too loud. “And this is just a spaceship, Augustine. And you and I are just companions, and the Emperor is only God.”

Augustine wanted to strangle her. “Shut up.”

“Sure,” she agreed, sweet. “I’ll shut up. And you can stop pretending that none of this matters to you.”

“How can you possibly-”

“It’s not just a house, you absolute fucking idiot.” Mercy’s voice was scornful, but her fingers gripped Augustine’s chin with a gentleness that shocked him. Not even in bed has she ever been so tender.

He sat frozen, stunned more than anything, as she cradled his jaw in the palm of her hand and said, “If you could go back and live, would you?”

He told her the truth. “No.”

Her thumb was at his mouth again, brushing the seam of his lips the way she did barely an hour ago. The same pressure, the same touch. It was obviously on purpose, and yet Augustine was at a loss about what she meant to communicate.

With that same uncharacteristic gentleness, she asked, “And if you could die?”

He flinched so violently that it tore his face from her grasp. He knew he was breathing too heavily; knew, too, that it would not slip past Mercy’s notice.

They sat in the darkness for so long that the conversation appeared to be over. Augustine was carefully thinking of nothing.

Finally, Mercymorn said, “If the worst comes to worse, that’s what I would want.” At his blank stare, she gave a tight-lipped smile. “I want to go home and live. If I can’t do that, I’d rather die.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug, indolent and casual. Augustine felt frozen to his seat, his eyes on her face. “Toss me into the nearest star, or something.”

“Or something,” he repeated, empty. It occurred to him, with some surprise, that though he’d always grumbled and moaned and joked darkly, he had never truly considered a reality in which Mercymorn the First were dead.

He’d rather through they would make each other’s lives hell forever.

“I would like to visit Cristabel’s grave again,” said Mercy.

And Augustine closed his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> as you have probably deduced, this fic is named after the poem that it references, which is "Le Gars" ("The Swain") by Marina Tsvetaeva. the translation I used is by Judith Still. the original is below:  
> C’est toi le fruit,  
> C’est moi le couteau.  
> C’est toi le mets,  
> C’est moi le mangeur.  
> Ton mangeur te fera honneur.
> 
> other miscellaneous notes:  
> -the song in the flashback to Augustine's childhood home is "Lilac Wine" by Jeff Buckley  
> -when mercy says, “Make me good, O Lord, but not yet” I am quoting The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
> 
> say hi on tumblr @ lyhoradka


End file.
